Re: IPFire on Utilite

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hi,

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 17:10 +0200, Igor Grinberg wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> On 11/13/13 14:04, Igor Vaisbein wrote:
> > Hello Michael,
> > 
> > I am glad to hear that you are making progress with support for i.MX6
> > devices. We already have done some work for multi-platform kernel
> > support so I do believe that most things are already in place.
> > 
> > I am copying Igor Grinberg, our Linux team leader. He will support
> > you with the necessary U-boot materials and documentation.
> > 
> > Looking forward to further developments.
> > 
> > Best Regards, Igor.
> > 
> > -----Original Message----- From: Michael Tremer
> > [mailto:michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org] Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013
> > 12:59 AM To: Igor Vaisbein Cc: sig-arm(a)lists.ipfire.org Subject:
> > IPFire on Utilite
> > 
> > Hello Igor,
> > 
> > although this email is directed to you, I am CC'ing our Special
> > Interest Group ARM mailing list for archiving purposes.
> > 
> > As you know, we are currently working on rebasing IPFire on Linux
> > 3.10 and we are introducing a multiplatform kernel which is supposed
> > to run on a lot of ARM boards including Utilite.
> 
> This is good to hear!
> There is a patchm adding basic support for Utilite,
> pending merge in the next merge window:
> 
> http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/shawnguo/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=95f7e8a387c84c3b4e07e1579daefbb61bc1096b

yes, this patch already has been imported with slight modifications for
kernel 3.10.

> > We made progress and solved some very hard to solve
> > grsecurity-related issues in association with Brad, so that we
> > currently have a kernel which boots on a Wandboard Quad - also based
> > on the same Freescale SoC you are using. Some patches for supporting
> > Utilite are already included, so that I have very high hopes, that
> > this kernel will already boot on that hardware as well.
> 
> That would be great!

Unfortunately, this is not the case, but I will figure this out later...
Give me a couple of days for that.

If you know about anything that could cause trouble in 3.10 or if there
are huge parts missing, please drop me a note :)

> > The Utilite I have got, unfortunately comes with an old version of
> > u-boot, which does not support the bootz command that is required to
> > easily boot a multiplatform kernel. Could you please provide the
> > sources so that we can build a version of u-boot with our
> > requirements? It would also be great if this is a more recent one
> > (don't know if there is development going on behind closed doors).
> 
> Our U-Boot for Utilite (cm-fx6) has the bootz command supported
> starting from version v2009.08-cm-fx6-0.90. The binary is attached.
> Here is the update procedure for SPI flash:
> 
> 1) Get the new binary into the RAM:
>   TFTP commands: tftp 10800000 cm-fx6-u-boot
>   MMC  commands: mmc dev 2 && mmc rescan && fatload mmc 2 10800000 cm-fx6-u-boot
> 
> 2) Do not power off Utilite during the next step! Erase and program U-Boot into
>    the SPI flash:
>   sf probe 0:0 && sf erase 0 40000 && sf write 10800000 0 40000
> 
> 3) Once the above operation has finished, reset the Utilite and the new U-Boot 
>    will boot.
> 
> I've uploaded the U-Boot sources to the Utilite gitorious project:
> https://gitorious.org/utilite
> 
> Have a nice hacking!

I flashed this version of u-boot to my device and it works fine. I tried
to boot it from sdcard, but that did not work with the command you
provided below. Possibly this should start after the first and not
second block (with size of 512 bytes), but I skipped searching for the
problem and decided to flash u-boot instead.

Also, thank you for the source code. Are there any plans to get all your
modifications upstream or is it intentional to remain with the version
from 2009?

> 
> > 
> > I also think I remember that Utilite will run the bootloader it can
> > find on the micro SD card, if I don't confuse this with an other
> > device. So that if I want to replace/test my own version of u-boot I
> > don't need to flash the internal one. I cannot find the documentation
> > about this matter any more and I would like to know where the u-boot
> > image needs to be placed in order to be executed.
> 
> Well, the following dd command can be used for placing the U-Boot binary
> onto an SD card:
> 
>   dd if=$UBOOTSRCFILE of=$SDCARDDEVFILE bs=1K seek=1 skip=1
> 
> 

-Michael